Write Now for the Road Ahead!

DSLCC is accredited by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges. The college must be reaccredited every ten years, and as part of reaccreditation, the college is developing strategies to improve student learning through a Quality Enhancement Plan (QEP). This plan will help guide the college through the next several years and will become an integral part of our campus.

Given the importance of written communication in today’s world, DSLCC recognizes that students must be able to write effectively in whatever career path they may choose to take. Therefore, our QEP, entitled "Write for the Road Ahead,” is intended to help improve the writing skills of DSLCC students. The QEP will consist of multiple components that are designed to accomplish various learning outcomes related to writing and each of these components will be introduced over the next few semesters.

The DSLCC Writing Center

Students, faculty, and staff can look forward to the opening of a new campus writing center in January 2014. This writing center will be located in the library and will offer one-on-one consultations to help students improve the quality of their written course assignments, professional communication, and other documents.

The DSLCC e-Portfolio

As another component of the QEP, students will be able to develop an electronic portfolio of their writing at DSLCC. For the purposes of the QEP, an electronic portfolio is a digital collection of student work, often in the form of a website that showcases students’ writing over their career at DSLCC. Students will be able to use pieces of writing that they complete as part of their curriculum coursework and will leave DSLCC with a finished product of work that they can show to potential employers or college admissions staff. The e-Portfolio is currently under development and certain students may take part in a pilot of the e-Portfolio during the fall 2013 semester.

e-Portfolio Courses

Learning to write requires practice throughout one’s academic career. Therefore, to help students build strong writing skills while at the same time collecting works of writing to include in their e-Portfolio, certain classes will be identified as e-Portfolio Courses (EPC). EPCs will be much like students’ other courses, though there will be more of an emphasis on the writing process. Students will be exposed to more strategies designed to help them improve their writing. Each EPC will require students to submit a piece of writing to their e-Portfolio and accompany it with a short paper designed to help them reflect on their writing. The purpose of these EPCs is to reinforce writing throughout a student’s program of study, emphasizing strategies for completing a variety of written works that are common within the general course of study and specific to the student’s academic program. EPCs will be piloted during the fall 2013 semester